29-571: James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist , writer, humorist, journalist, and playwright. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker and collected in his numerous books. Thurber was one of the most popular humorists of his time and celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. His works have frequently been adapted into films, including The Male Animal (1942), The Battle of
58-615: A contemporary and friend of Thurber, referred to his cartoons as having the "semblance of unbaked cookies". The last drawing Thurber completed was a self-portrait in yellow crayon on black paper, which was featured as the cover of Time magazine on July 9, 1951. The same drawing was used for the dust jacket of The Thurber Album ( 1952 ). Cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comics illustrators / artists in that they produce both
87-591: A ferry to Martha's Vineyard , Thurber began summering in Cornwall , Connecticut, along with many other prominent artists and authors of the time. After three years of renting, Thurber found a home, which he referred to as "The Great Good Place", in Cornwall, Connecticut. Thurber's behavior became erratic in his last year. Thurber was stricken with a blood clot on the brain on October 4, 1961, and underwent emergency surgery, drifting in and out of consciousness. Although
116-460: A five-part New Yorker series, between 1947 and 1948, examining in depth the radio soap opera phenomenon, based on near-constant listening and researching over the same period. Leaving nearly no element of these programs unexamined, including their writers, producers, sponsors, performers, and listeners alike, Thurber republished the series in his anthology, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948), under
145-422: A lawyer or an actor. Thurber described his mother as a "born comedian" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known". She was a practical joker and on one occasion pretended to be disabled, and attended a faith healer revival only to jump up and proclaim herself healed. When Thurber was seven years old, he and one of his brothers were playing a game of William Tell , when his brother shot James in
174-844: A moral as a tagline. An exception to this format was his most famous fable, " The Unicorn in the Garden ", which featured an all-human cast except for the unicorn, which does not speak. Thurber's fables were satirical , and the morals served as punch lines as well as advice to the reader, demonstrating "the complexity of life by depicting the world as an uncertain, precarious place, where few reliable guidelines exist." His stories also included several book-length fairy tales, such as The White Deer (1945), The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957). The latter two were among several of Thurber's works illustrated by Marc Simont . Thurber's prose for The New Yorker and other venues included numerous humorous essays. A favorite subject, especially toward
203-652: A neurological condition that causes complex visual hallucinations in people who have had some level of visual loss. (This was the basis for the piece "The Admiral on the Wheel".) From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended Ohio State University where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and editor of the student magazine, the Sundial . It was during this time that he rented the house on 77 Jefferson Avenue, which became Thurber House in 1984. He never graduated from
232-679: A story of madness and murder. His best-known short stories are "The Dog That Bit People" and " The Night the Bed Fell "; they can be found in My Life and Hard Times , which was his "break-out" book. Among his other classics are " The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ", " The Catbird Seat ", "The Night the Ghost Got In", " A Couple of Hamburgers ", "The Greatest Man in the World", and "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox ". The Middle-Aged Man on
261-615: A weekly column called "Credos and Curios", a title that was given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber returned to Paris during this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. In 1925, Thurber moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, obtaining a job as a reporter with the New York Evening Post . He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor, with
290-654: The Republican elephant . Comic strips received widespread distribution to mainstream newspapers by syndicates . Calum MacKenzie, in his preface to the exhibition catalog, The Scottish Cartoonists (Glasgow Print Studio Gallery, 1979) defined the selection criteria: Many strips were the work of two people although only one signature was displayed. Shortly after Frank Willard began Moon Mullins in 1923, he hired Ferd Johnson as his assistant. For decades, Johnson received no credit. Willard and Johnson traveled about Florida , Maine, Los Angeles , and Mexico, drawing
319-500: The 18th century, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs; illustrations in such style are often referred to as "Hogarthian". Following the work of Hogarth, editorial/political cartoons began to develop in England in the latter part of the 18th century under the direction of its great exponents, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson , both from London. Gillray explored the use of the medium for lampooning and caricature , calling
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#1732793533918348-718: The 1950s. Thurber married Althea Adams in 1922, although the marriage, as he later wrote to a friend, devolved into "a relationship charming, fine, and hurting". They lived in the Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House , in Fairfield County, Connecticut , with their daughter Rosemary (b. 1931). The marriage ended in divorce in May 1935, and Althea kept Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House. He married his editor, Helen Muriel Wismer (1902–1986) in June 1935. After meeting Mark Van Doren on
377-540: The Flying Trapeze has several short stories with a tense undercurrent of marital discord. The book was published the year of his divorce and remarriage. Although his 1941 story "You Could Look It Up", about a three-foot adult being brought in to take a walk in a baseball game, has been said to have inspired Bill Veeck 's stunt with Eddie Gaedel with the St. Louis Browns in 1951, Veeck claimed an older provenance for
406-511: The Sexes (1959, based on Thurber's " The Catbird Seat "), and " The Secret Life of Walter Mitty " (adapted twice, in 1947 and in 2013 ). Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio , to Charles L. Thurber and Mary Agnes "Mame" (née Fisher) Thurber on December 8, 1894. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. His father was a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being
435-456: The end of his life, was the English language. Pieces on this subject included "The Spreading 'You Know'," which decried the overuse of that pair of words in conversation, "The New Vocabularianism", and "What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?". His short pieces – whether stories, essays or something in between – were referred to as "casuals" by Thurber and the staff of The New Yorker . Thurber wrote
464-409: The eye with an arrow. He lost that eye, and the injury later caused him to become almost entirely blind. He was unable to participate in sports and other activities in his childhood because of this injury, but he developed a creative mind, which he used to express himself in writings. Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran suggests that Thurber's imagination may be partly explained by Charles Bonnet syndrome ,
493-450: The help of E. B. White , his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 after White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication; White inked-in some of these earlier drawings to make them reproduce better for the magazine, and years later expressed deep regret he had done such a thing. Thurber contributed both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until
522-775: The king ( George III ), prime ministers and generals to account, and has been referred to as the father of the political cartoon. While never a professional cartoonist, Benjamin Franklin is credited with the first cartoon published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754: Join, or Die , depicting the American colonies as segments of a snake. In the 19th century, professional cartoonists such as Thomas Nast , whose work appeared in Harper's Weekly , introduced other familiar American political symbols, such as
551-585: The literary and graphic components of the work as part of their practice. Cartoonists may work in a variety of formats, including booklets , comic strips , comic books , editorial cartoons , graphic novels , manuals , gag cartoons , storyboards , posters , shirts , books , advertisements , greeting cards , magazines , newspapers , webcomics , and video game packaging . A cartoonist's discipline encompasses both authorial and drafting disciplines (see interdisciplinary arts ). The terms "comics illustrator", "comics artist", or "comic book artist" refer to
580-494: The operation was initially successful, Thurber died a few weeks later, on November 2, aged 66, due to complications from pneumonia . The doctors said his brain was senescent from several small strokes and hardening of the arteries. His last words , aside from the repeated word "God", were "God bless... God damn", according to his wife, Helen. Thurber also became well known for his simple, outlandish drawings and cartoons. Both his literary and his drawing skills were helped along by
609-475: The picture-making portion of the discipline of cartooning (see illustrator ). While every "cartoonist" might be considered a "comics illustrator", "comics artist", or a "comic book artist", not every "comics illustrator", "comics artist", or a "comic book artist" is a "cartoonist". Ambiguity might arise when illustrators and writers share each other's duties in authoring a work. The English satirist and editorial cartoonist William Hogarth , who emerged in
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#1732793533918638-610: The section title "Soapland." The series was one of the first to examine such a pop-culture phenomenon in depth. The last twenty years of Thurber's life were filled with material and professional success in spite of his blindness. He published at least fourteen books in that era, including The Thurber Carnival (1945), Thurber Country (1953), and the extremely popular book about New Yorker founder/editor Harold Ross , The Years with Ross (1959). A number of Thurber's short stories were made into movies, including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 1947. While Thurber drew his cartoons in
667-478: The strip while living in hotels, apartments and farmhouses. At its peak of popularity during the 1940s and 1950s, the strip ran in 350 newspapers. According to Johnson, he had been doing the strip solo for at least a decade before Willard's death in 1958: "They put my name on it then. I had been doing it about 10 years before that because Willard had heart attacks and strokes and all that stuff. The minute my name went on that thing and his name went off, 25 papers dropped
696-495: The strip. That shows you that, although I had been doing it ten years, the name means a lot." Societies and organizations Societies and organizations Sanford%E2%80%93Curtis%E2%80%93Thurber House The Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House , also known as James Thurber House , is a historic house at 71 Riverside Road in the Sandy Hook section of Newtown, Connecticut . It is a Georgian style house built in c.1780 that
725-618: The stunt. In addition to his other fiction, Thurber wrote more than seventy-five fables , some of which were first published in The New Yorker (1939), then collected in Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956). These were short stories that featured anthropomorphic animals (e.g. "The Little Girl and the Wolf", his version of Little Red Riding Hood ) as main characters, and ended with
754-400: The support of, and collaboration with, fellow New Yorker staff member E. B. White , who insisted that Thurber's sketches could stand on their own as artistic expressions. Thurber drew six covers and numerous classic illustrations for The New Yorker . Many of Thurber's short stories are humorous fictional memoirs from his life, but he also wrote darker material, such as "The Whip-Poor-Will",
783-695: The university because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) course. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree. From 1918 to 1920, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the United States Department of State , first in Washington, D.C., and then at the embassy in Paris . On returning to Columbus, he began his career as a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed books, films, and plays in
812-518: The usual fashion in the 1920s and 1930s, his failing eyesight later required changes. He drew them on very large sheets of paper using a thick black crayon (or on black paper using white chalk, from which they were photographed and the colors reversed for publication). Regardless of method, his cartoons became as noted as his writings; they possessed an eerie, wobbly feel that seems to mirror his idiosyncratic view on life. He once wrote that people said it looked like he drew them under water. Dorothy Parker ,
841-551: Was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. The house is a large, rural Georgian style farmhouse built for a prosperous farmer named Thomas Sanford (1732-1814), one of the first settlers in the Newtown area. The family farm was sold in 1824 to Hezekiah Curtis (1796-1866). The house was purchased in 1931 by Althea Thurber, the first wife of author and humorist James Thurber (1894–1961), and it
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